Mohammad Eslami’s Role In Iran’s Secret Nuclear Projects
Mojtaba Pourmohsen
Iran International
Mohammad Eslami, Iran's current nuclear chief, played a key role in the secret part of the country’s nuclear program, according to a confidential source.
Iran International
Mohammad Eslami, Iran's current nuclear chief, played a key role in the secret part of the country’s nuclear program, according to a confidential source.
President Ebrahim Raisi appointed Eslami to his current position in 2021 amid pressure by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding uranium traces found at three nuclear facilities used prior to 2003 when Iran’s nuclear program was secret.
The source who is familiar with the inner workings of AEOI told Iran International that Eslami has the task of erasing the traces of suspicious nuclear activities of the Islamic Republic.
There is reason to believe that the three sites were not only used prior to 2003, but also much later.
Eslami had served as Minister of Roads and Urban Development in the former government and his appointment as nuclear chief surprised many. For the younger generation, the former official’s background seemed unrelated to his nuclear post.
However, a look at Eslami’s resume shows that he played a crucial role in the most critical stages of Tehran’s secret nuclear projects.
Between 1987 and 1989, an envoy from the Ministry of Defense traveled to Dubai to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear knowledge and enrichment equipment to the Islamic Republic.
Years later, Abdul Qadeer Khan confirmed the deal with the Islamic Republic in a television interview.
The source with links to the Iranian Organization of the Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) said, that the mission to Khan was carried out under the supervision of an office headed by Mohammad Eslami.
In a chart leaked from nuclear documents stolen from Iran by Israel, the role of Mohammad Eslami is prominent. As the head of the Defense Industries Educational and Research Institute, he was involved in all aspects of Iran's secret nuclear program that grew into various branches over the years.
One of the most important of these was the Amad project, the Islamic Republic's plan to build an atomic warhead that was pursued under the supervision of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's prominent nuclear figure and was stopped in 2003 when it was revealed or leaked.
Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in November 2020, reportedly by Israel in a complicated operation resembling Hollywood thrillers.
The source in SPND said the supervisor of this project was Eslami, and the funds allocated to these programs were spent directly in line with Mohammad Eslami's discretion.
With the closure of the "Amad" project, Iran's secret nuclear projects continued in a new organization, the SPND.
For two years after the signing of the JCPOA, Eslami was the deputy of industrial and research affairs of the Ministry of Defense and a member of Iran's nuclear program.
An office mentioned in the nuclear administrative chart of the Islamic Republic is of particular interest. The Orchid Office is an important center in Iran's program to acquire nuclear weapons, according to our source. A building on Orchid Street in Pasdaran district, Tehran, is where major contracts are signed was managed until two years ago by Eslami until Fakhrizadeh was assassinated.
SPND was the center where Fakhrizadeh was pursuing his unfinished plan for the Amad project on a separate budget line.
The United States has sanctioned SPND exactly for its secretive nuclear work.
The two nuclear sites of Sorkh-eh-hesar, [Tehran], and Marivan near Abadeh, Fars Province, were given to SPND so that Fakhrizadeh could pursue his plan to produce nuclear weapons with the cooperation of Saeed Borji, an expert in atomic explosions.
However, by looking at the history of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, each of the heads of this organization was appointed out of a specific necessity.
During the years when the secret nuclear program was pursued in the Ministry of Defense, Reza Amralahi was the head of the organization.
With the development of this program and the need to build and equip extensive facilities such as Natanz, in Esfahan Province, Gholamreza Aghazadeh became the head of the organization. This former oil minister had the power to inject cash into Iran's nuclear program.
His strong disagreement with then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led Ali Akbar Salehi to become the head of the organization. Salehi who was Iran’s former representative at the IAEA took the helm of the Atomic Energy Organization when the negotiating team when the UN Security Council was issuing sanction after sanction against Iran in early 2010s.
With the assassination of nuclear scientists and under the pressure of the Revolutionary Guards, Fereydoun Abbasi became the head of the Atomic Energy Organization, who himself had survived an assassination.
Although years later, in an interview with the Ensaf News website, which was deleted after publication, a security official considered his assassination suspicious and raised the possibility that he was a spy. Abbasi was one of Fakhrizadeh's colleagues and one of his vociferous opponents and rivals.
When the JCPOA’s time arrived, Salehi returned to the AEOI as a scientific figure.
With the election of Raisi in the most engineered election in the history of the Islamic Republic, Eslami is the repository of Islamic Republic’s nuclear secrets and was appointed as the best suited person in the post of nuclear chief to eradicate all traces.
He announced August 1 that the Islamic Republic had achieved the ability to build nuclear weapons.
During his one-year tenure, Iran has hardened its position not to provide further explanations to the IAEA on past nuclear work and Eslami has turned off most of the international watchdog’s monitoring equipment in Iran’s nuclear facilities.
He seems to be a man who has returned to Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to clear his and his colleagues’ footprints on the secret part of Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, a prominent academic and ‘reformist’ analyst in Tehran said, "Iran's hardliners do not want an agreement, they simply want a respectful exit from the JCPOA." As though confirming this view, Noor News, a website close to Iran's Supreme Council of National Security, dismissed optimism in Europe and America about an imminent agreement.
Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, the former head of the Iranian Parliament's Foreign Policy and national Security Committee wrote in a commentary on Didban Iran [Iran Monitor] website that "Tehran and Washington are trying to blame each other for the failure of the nuclear negotiations and declare an end to diplomacy."
The conservative politician added that the only possibility for the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal depends on whether Iran and the United States are committed to a long-term understanding in their relations.
In a rare clarity from a commentator in Iran over the nuclear issue, Falahatpisheh maintained that Iran should create a meaningful distance between its nuclear capabilities and the time when it can make a bomb. This will help the United States to convince its regional allies including Israel about the usefulness of an agreement. At the same time, Washington should undertake to protect Iran’s economic and trade ties once a deal is signed.
Falahatpisheh added that even Raisi's opponents in Iran do not agree with a deal that would compromise Iran's nuclear achievements, meaning its Uranium enrichment capability.
The commentator said, however, that the Supreme Council of National Security, which is reviewing EU's proposal for a deal, should not accept it if it cannot be practically implemented. "Iran should not compromise its achievements and should only accept a comprehensive deal," he said. Falahatpisheh added that even if Iran rules out the EU proposal, Tehran and Washington can still work out an "oil for inspection deal" with the purpose of confidence building. He said such a deal would be based on a partial lifting of US sanctions.
Meanwhile, in an interview with the government-owned semi-official news agency ISNA, hardliner commentator Abbas Salimi Namin claimed that nuclear accusations against Iran that hinder an agreement are mainly fabricated by Israel and some Iranian opposition groups.
Salimi Namin also repeated Iran’s demand that the new agreement should contain a mechanism that would prevent a US withdrawal in the future. Without that mechanism, naturally, Iran will not welcome the proposal," he said.
Salimi Namin tried to reassure JCPOA member states that ultimately once the highest authority in Iran agrees to a deal, it will be final. He pointed out that "despite the harsh criticism of the JCPOA in Iran in 2015, no one tried to put an end to the deal. "
Reformist analyst Sadeq Zibakalam told Khabar Online website that Iran's hardliners want a decent exit from the JCPOA rather than an agreement with the United States. He said Iranian negotiators and officials set meaningless and impossible conditions for an agreement hoping that no deal would be reached.
One such instance is Iran’s demand for the West to guarantee an economic windfall from a nuclear deal, Zibakalam said. This depends not only on the JCPOA but also Tehran’s change of behavior and relations with its neighbors, otherwise not many companies would be willing to deal with Iran.
Mohammad Marandi, who acts as de facto spokesman on the talks, referred both to the four-day round of meetings in Vienna that concluded Monday and to earlier rounds. “Iran was able to make significant progress in all fields, which of course will be announced in due course,” Marandi told the Young Journalists Club, a state-owned news agency.
Marandi claimed western journalist had told him that “many government elites of Western countries, as well as Persian-language media people based abroad” also regarded the talks as a success for Iran.
The Vienna talks – largely indirect contacts between the United States and Iran mediated by the European Union – ended with senior EU official Enrique Mora circulating a document designed to bridge remaining gaps. While the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called this a “final text,” Iranian officials treated it as a set of proposals needing further review.
Awaiting ‘high-level meeting’
Nour News, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported late Wednesday that the text was being analyzed “at the experts’ level,” but had not yet been discussed by a “high-level meeting.” The SNSC, made up of 24 of Iran’s leading politicians and military commanders, shapes policy on the nuclear issue, although crucial decisions may come in informal discussions around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The nuclear talks, beginning in April 2021 in an effort to revive the 2015 agreement (the JCPOA), have wrestled with intertwined political and technical issues – essentially over which US sanctions introduced after Washington left the JCPOA in 2018 contravene the 2015 agreement and how Iran’s atomic program, expanded since 2019, should be returned to JCPOA limits.
Marandi reiterated that Tehran expects the dropping of “false accusations against Iran in the agency,” a reference to enquiries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into Iranian nuclear work before 2003. The US and three European JCPOA signatories argue these enquiries arise under Tehran’s basic obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have nothing to do with renewing the JCPOA.
Iran, on the other hand, argues that the IAEA concluded investigations into Iran’s past nuclear work in 2015, the year the JCPOA was agreed, and revived them only after allegations made by Israel in 2018, the year the US left the JCPOA.
“Let's not forget that before the previous meeting of the Board of Governors [in June, which passed a resolution critical of Iran], the head of the agency, [Rafael Mariano] Grossi, travelled to Israel,” Marandi said.
Iran had promised earlier this year to provide satisfactory answers to the IAEA regarding questions around its past secret nuclear work, but in late May the agency said it had not received convincing explanations.
Guarded comments
In remarks published Thursday on the Rouydad news website, Hossein Maliki, of the Iranian parliament’s security and foreign policy committee, warned that negotiations could be facing a “dead end…because we see less flexibility in the Americans.”
Maliki said he had not seen the Mora text, but his guarded comments – noting Iran’s “positive opinion” on “some provisions” of a “previous text”, an apparent reference to a document circulated by Borrell in late July – suggested he was hedging while long-term JCPOA opponents argued the talks had failed.
The official news agency IRNA reported that Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in a telephone conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, expressed hope that “the American side, with a realistic and pragmatic view…will provide the ground for an agreement on the final text.”